I have been moving closer to my fears. Anxiety arises. My body feels uneasy and heavy. But yet, i know that its part of the process. I feel myself breathing a bit more heavily.

This is an excerpt of an interview with Ken Wilbur. I found this shadow work thing quie interesting. Awareness alone does not bring light to all our imbalanced ego. When our shadows get triggered, we cant shine that presence on them becuase we are just too taken in by the momentum.

Tami Simon: So one more aspect of this I just want to make sure that I understand: You know many times, meditation teachers will tell you that, you know, "Just meditate. That's all you need to do," and yet you're saying that meditation won't get to these unconscious shadow pieces. You have to do something like shadow work. Why is that?

Ken Wilber: Right. Well, apparently much of the shadow, when it's disowned, is done so through very strong psychodynamic repression and other types of defense mechanisms, and these mechanisms, themselves, are unconscious. They're not something that you really can see, so they're a defense mechanism that then hides itself, and it tends to be very strong. It tends to be very powerful. Simply introspecting, turning within and introspecting, isn't enough to penetrate these repression barriers. I know, in the general field, itself, particularly a field called transpersonal psychology, which studies these things a lot, thirty years ago, when transpersonal psychology started, it really was thought that meditation would do everything. Meditation would not only show you the royal road to the superconscious, it was a royal road to the subconscious, and that it would lower the repression barrier and allow all shadow material to surface, and so it was really thought to cover all of the bases. But as the years went on, and we both looked at the theory of that, it sort of became more and more unbelievable on theoretical grounds that meditation could do all of this stuff, but then also we had—you know, and there's sort of no way to talk abut this except embarrassingly, in personal terms—we had several decades of meditation teachers practicing meditation all the time, and their shadows just as big as they ever were, and in some cases, bigger! Clearly something wasn't working here, and so it's just one of the things that we have found out the hard way. How many people know great, great meditation teachers that have shadows following them around and getting them into trouble? So we learned that the hard way, and that's why we make the sort of mental Integral Practice cover body, mind, spirit, and shadow. It's just too important, and long experience, both theoretically and particularly personally, has shown us that meditation doesn't get at all or even most of the shadow.

And you can see rows of Buddhists repeating mantras and not going anywhere.

Basically all this is saying is that mankind's desire to hide from the vastness of reality is so great that he has betrayed meditation itself and all spiritual paths eventually turn into a way to hide.

Meditation itself is not at fault, but the limited notion of it that is advocated by so many.

Witness people talking about "The Present Moment" ... as if it's a cure all, and so many people saying they are enlightened because they have found it ... but that's only half the job ... the other half is to integrate creation into it.

But ... like I said people's desire to hide to be free of pain is very great ... that they miss the endlessness of what is.

Buddhism for instance is founded on "End of Suffering" rather than "All that there is".

Just think what that means - it means Buddhism is a hiding place. That's a big thing to say.

Also, mankind as a whole is moving forward, evolving and the technology is moving forward as people open up new avenues. It is not the case that 'enlightenment' is an end ... but an ever evolving discovery. Although my understanding is that there are fixed milestones that represent a completeness in one aspect or another, and these are important. But not the end, just the end of the beginning.

But ... as you can clearly see ... almost all who talk of these things are looking to end their pain, reach a conclusion, or to be spared pain. When this is not really what is here.

To grow your understanding of the matters is the path itself ...

I remember a few years ago I was doing a lot of meditation and trying to jump into an awareness I had never been in before ... I realised that it required something like this. Some great leap into the unknown. To find something that you didn't understand in a place you did not know using a faculty that you do not know you possess. And in so attempting, you realise that EVERYTHING you have ever done is just a robotic repetition of the past, and for the first time you are attempting to do something that has never been done, something beyond yourself.

> it was awesome

I was proud, and I demanded the finest teacher.. .. and when he appeared.. .. .. .. I was so small

Most if not all of my earliest fears came from bad/inadequate parenting! It took a lot of work and examination to realize how seriously my ignorant parents damaged me back when I had a lot of trust, innocence and NO-FEAR of "losses". This was during intense therapy which led to my emotional Recovery from very damaging parenting. Now, after many years of personal happiness, I have found a need to go deeper and find my Real Self under my now repaired but still lacking egoic personality but I no longer fear loss or any of the other fears my dysfunctional parents caused me so, in a way, you could say my childhood fears and emotional damage was a BLESSING - if that pain and fear allowed me to finally wake up and become who I really am beyond the damaged child/person I used to be.